Primordialism

Primordialism, also known as Perennialism, is a school of nationalism which contends that the concept of nations is an ancient, natural phenomenon. Primordialists point to the Greek resistance to the Persian invasions of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, Alexander the Great's Hellenization of Asia, and Gaul's united struggle against the Roman Republic as examples of ancient nationalism. A school opposing this theory is Modernism, a theory that claimed that nationalism had developed as a result of modernity; this theory surpassed Primordialism in popularity after the end of World War II.